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Category: Real Estate Misc

If you are a real estate agent or someone looking to take your real estate website to the next level, then I highly recommend the Agent WordPress theme by StudioPress. It’s an amazing black two or three column professional theme with a strong emphasis on photos and functionality.

Unlike many other real estate themed templates, this modern theme is customized so you can actually display your listings, write articles, create pages, and even have your own blog all-in-one. You can’t beat that functionality.

Once you view the live demo, you’ll notice that the home page has an animated rotating sideshow so you can easily display your top listings. The theme designer and developer cleverly used WordPress categories to create a real estate search engine of sorts that highlights all of a brokerage’s or agent’s listings.

Below you will see what a single listing page looks like. It’s very clean and provides a large photo spot and main description towards the top. Following that area is a “Property Details” and “Additional Photos” sections. I can only say so much about this theme. It’s just better if you see it in action for yourself.

With this package you get unlimited theme support and customization techniques with detailed theme tutorials. Brian Gardner is the designer behind this beauty and he’s got several other templates as well. If you are looking for a low-cost and high-quality premium WordPress theme then this is just for you. I personally have purchased one of his other themes (Revolution Sports) which is actually what this real estate blog uses.

To have this sort of custom design done for your blog would easily cost several hundred dollars. On top of that, you’d have to pay a web developer to code this into a WordPress theme. Essencially you would pay close to $1,000 for this! The good news? This template costs only $59.95 or you can buy the entire set of his amazing premium WordPress themes for $199.95! You also get instant access to download it right after you pay. Credit card or PayPal are both accepted.

I promise you won’t be disappointed with this theme. Keep in mind though after you purchase it, you’ll need to spend at least one hour getting everything configured.

The importance of quality brochures for real estate agents and those trying to advertise their properties is sometimes overlooked. Just like a resume, the quality of paper you use reflects on your professionalism. How many times have you seen a cheap piece of paper presenting a house or apartment building for sale? Most of the time I see these fliers they are people trying to sell the home without a real estate agent. In my opinion, it’s worth going the extra mile to spend a few bucks more to pay for quality brochures and or paper.

The second part of printing brochures has to do with convience. I like being able to handle any brochure printing needs with ease and one such solution is to use an online printing company. After doing some searching online, I ended up finding such a service called www.psprint.com. I have yet to use their offerings but when the time comes, I’m sure to give them a try.

Has anyone else tried an online printing service before? If so, what were your experiences? I’d like to think most online businesses are legit but without a positive review from a nuetral person, it’s hard to trust a site.

With all the volatility in today’s real estate market, it’s more important than ever to understand the numbers before you buy. As my grandmother used to say, know how deep the pool is before you jump in! The right software can do just that (metaphorically speaking, of course), turning an often confusing and intimidating analysis into a straight-forward (and dare I say “fun”) exercise. The following case study looks at real estate investment analysis software, and how it can be used by investors—novice and professional, alike—to assess the financial viability and risk of a property.

This case study analyzes real world properties using real estate investment analysis software by GreyStone Analytics (full disclosure: I’m the founder and CEO of GreyStone Analytics, so please forgive any bias). The goal of the study is not to promote a particular software product, but to show how such analysis tools can help investors make profitable decisions. Continue reading Case Study: Maximize Your Investment Return Using Real Estate Software

Let’s say you’ve spent lots of time learning about real estate investing and finally started looking for properties. You end up finding a potential investment property and now you want to know if it will be cash flow positive. Sure, you could plug all your numbers into an excel spreadsheet and setup some formulas but I’ve got a better option for you.

When dealing with real estate investment properties you want to make sure you’re always protected. I don’t just mean having a proper landlord insurance policy, I’m more referring to what’s called a living trust structure.

The most successful real estate investors out there today all have some sort of trust set up for each and every one of their real estate properties. This could be just their primary residence, or it could be dozens of apartment buildings they own. Since real estate deeds are a publicly accessible document, it means anybody can find out whose name is on title for a specific address. This type of trust structure which is better known as a Living Trust or Master Protection Trust is very useful for your real estate investments. It has many benefits one of which is especially important to celebrities and wealthy individuals. Do you think that Donald Trump or Bill Gates is names are listed as the owner of any property title document? I don’t think so. Continue reading How To Protect Yourself From Real Estate Liability

For those of you who tried to access the Real Estate Blog over the past several weeks, you may have noticed some problems. I thought these problems would go away but they continued so last week I moved the Real Estate Blog to a new web hosting provider. My previous web hosting provider Host Monster (aff) kept having outages and hindered my site so I had to do something. I was with Host Monster for almost a year and rarely had down time up until recently. Besides the recent outages I’d like believe part of it has to do with the continued success and upward trending web traffic the blog has been receiving. 🙂 I moved to a new hosting provider by the name of Web Hosting Buzz and have been quite happy with them even though it’s only been a week. Hopefully this up-time will continue and my readers won’t get frustrated when trying to access the site!

A real estate purchase agreement is not a rough guide to a deal. It is a contract specifying exactly what legal obligations each side has. In other words, be sure it says what you want it to say, and has everything you need in it.

Normally, if you are buying a property that is listed with a real estate broker, they will have a purchase agreement ready to have the blanks filled in. If you have a buyer’s agent that you work with, he or she will have the necessary forms. There are the routine parts which are necessary, but not easily forgotten or done wrong. These include the following.

The Date – Names of Buyer(s) and Seller(s) – Address Of Property – Legal Description Of Property – Purchase Price And Terms – List Of Anything Included With Property – Date The Deal Should Close By – Closing Process – Disclosure Statement – Signature With Date For Buyer And Seller – Addresses and Phone Numbers Of Buyer And Seller. Continue reading A Real Estate Purchase Agreement

For those of you interested in investing outside of the US, I’d recommend checking out a cool new European property search engine called Properazzi.com. This site collects listings from thousands of websites and presents them in a simple Google map sort of way. This clever play on words website currently boasts over 1.8 million properties listed in 45 European countries.

Find your dream second home or go global with your real estate investing plan by using this cool property aggregation website. It costs nothing to use and would be a great excuse to find a potential investment property to fly out and see and write off the whole trip! 🙂

There are many new websites popping up like zillow.com and auctioncloud.com which claim to give you a pretty good estimate of what your home or even your best friend’s home is worth. The technology out there today allows such sites to do this and are pretty impressive compared to the old days where you’d have to go around reading newspapers or speaking with real estate agents to find out what neighborhood homes typically sell for.